Camden Health Explorer

Goal

To develop Camden Health Explorer, a dashboard that combines individual and aggregate health information to help policymakers and stakeholders understand and act on local health data

In Camden, New Jersey, as in many U.S. cities, 30 percent of healthcare costs come from just 1 percent of patients. Many of these patients arrive in emergency rooms seeking care for easily treatable or preventable conditions; they are often faced with a fragmented, uncoordinated and expensive health care system. The Camden Coalition of Healthcare Providers is addressing this problem by sharing data between the city’s hospitals and providers to better target resources and proactively tackle patient health issues. The Camden Health Explorer is the next step in this effort. The Explorer, built in partnership with BlueLabs, an analytics, data and technology firm, will aggregate anonymized individual health and medical claims data, then display and map the results by demography and geography. Camden Coalition staff will work with local stakeholders, including hospital administrators, providers, and policymakers, to ensure the data is used to make Camden’s healthcare system more efficient and ultimately make patients healthier. The dashboard will be open source and available to other communities.